Photo caption: Shelly Ervin, your Secretary-Treasurer, and Jim Pearson, your union President, recently travelled to the Powell River Town Centre Hotel on the Sunshine Coast to participate at the regular Shop Steward meeting with Area Steward and Executive Board member Lorrie Dyer who works at the Coast Discovery in Campbell River. Shop Stewards Heather Davenport, Flo Rolandi and Wendy Rideout attended the meeting, held on a monthly basis, where they discuss issues of concern from the members working at this hotel property. Many successful efforts have been undertaken by your union in the past 18 months that reflect your union leadership’s ongoing commitment to securing future growth and prosperity for our members and our union. I am pleased to report we are making significant advances in so many areas, and it is a direct result of increased membership involvement with our union. I am so pleased to see so many members stepping forward and taking action by participating in the Workplace Committees that have been created at many Local 40 properties – these committees and your involvement in them is what is truly helping to make the changes we need to secure our futures in the tourism, hotel and food service industries we work in across British Columbia. Most recently, we have seen a historic new collective agreement, negotiated by our brothers and sisters working in downtown Vancouver at the Four Seasons, the Westin Bayshore, the Renaissance Vancouver and the Hyatt Regency, that achieved ground breaking new language and fairly dealt with many long standing issues that our members working at these properties have had to face. We worked together, we organized ourselves, we established our priorities and a strategy of how we were going to achieve what we deserve. And we stuck to the plan we set out on. We secured training to help increase our strength and involvement, we all went to the meetings, and together we took on a new understanding of what it was going to take to get what we wanted. Most of all, we made a firm commitment to stick together and, standing side by side with our union brothers and sisters, we were successful in achieving more than we have ever achieved before! Congratulations to our Vancouver hotel workers for their dedication and commitment to the collective bargaining process. The pride I see on the shop floor from that experience has not faltered. And it is not just the downtown Vancouver corporate hotel workers who have had this experience. Our members working at the Cara Flight Kitchen by the airport in Richmond also used the UNITE HERE Workers Rising Program to achieve great success at their workplace that resulted in a historic new collective agreement with significant positive improvements on the shop floor. By working together, it is possible to change for the positive. We continue to work together to learn new strategies, and our union Executive Board has recently taken some great steps to ensure our union continues on our path of success led by our president, Jim Pearson. We have hired a Community Organizer who is helping us to generate community support for our issues. Judy Esber from UNITE HERE has come on board and is helping us expose our member’s concerns about their workplace issues to the broader community – faith-based organizations, our political leaders and our brothers and sisters in the labour movement. As a result, we have now undertaken a massive community awareness effort to bring attention to the disparity of working conditions for our members working at three major Lower Mainland hotels where contract negotiations are currently underway. Members working in all departments at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel in Richmond, the Hilton Vancouver Metrotown in Burnaby and the Holiday Inn Vancouver Centre on Broadway are currently seeking not only wage parity with their union brothers and sisters at the downtown Vancouver hotels, but they too need to see improvements to their workload, their health & safety issues and to secure a brighter future with improved pension benefits. I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate our members who recently participated at a political fundraiser in Burnaby for MLA Raj Chouhan. Sister Beth Marshall and Sister Katherine Giesbrecht joined with us to see first hand the roles they can play in gathering support from our community for our issues, this time through our political representatives. This was a rewarding opportunity to both support an MLA who has taken our concerns to heart and has shown his public support, and an opportunity to network with other community members to further expose our issues, gather support and continue to make our union stronger. In the office in Burnaby, we have recently had the pleasure of undergoing a thorough review of our finances during an auditing process with one of our UNITE HERE International Union auditors. Our membership can be assured that your union finances are consistently monitored and reviewed to maintain the high level of fiduciary responsibility that includes strict proprietary regulations and measures to ensure funds are correctly utilized for the benefit of the membership. Our International Union provides regular training sessions for union financial officers, and both Jim Pearson and myself recently attended one of these intensive training and review sessions in Toronto. We are very fortunate to have such high standards and UNITE HERE provides a standard of checks and balances that ensures we are always on top of current financial administration practices. As a result, you can be assured that, together with the great work of our union staff, we are consistently meeting and exceeding our union’s high standards of practice. In closing, I am very pleased to report that we recently wrote a letter to Brother John Wilhelm, president of the UNITE HERE Hospitality Industry and Brother Bruce Raynor, UNITE HERE General President, requesting an exemption to the constitutionally mandated union dues increase scheduled to go into effect October 1, 2007. Brother Wilhelm recently informed us in writing that we have succeeded in obtaining a waiver for this year’s dues increase. On behalf of the membership, I’d like to extend our gratitude to Brother Wilhelm for his attention to this matter. I look forward to communicating with you again in the next issue of The Mixer. In the meantime, if you have any concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me. | 
